Tiswas, 1981: Den Hegarty, Frank Carson and David McKellar
So yesterday I drove up to Birmingham for a reunion of people who worked on the children’s TV series Tiswas. It turned out there were 100 fans there too.
Everyone I knew years ago seem to have grown white hair and beards or both apart from presenter Sally James and you can never be too sure of anything nowadays.
I got chatting with David McKellar, who was Associate Producer/Script Associate on Tiswas when I was there. He was a wildly experienced gag writer. I remember being impressed when I realised he had written one of the few jokes I ever remembered, a fake news headline:
“Bad news for three-foot dwarfs… four feet snow drifts.”
I think David Frost delivered the gag in one of his TV series, probably The Frost Report.
David at the Tiswas gathering in Birmingham yesterday
David McKellar wrote for various David Frost shows as well as Ken Dodd, Frankie Howard, Tommy Cooper, Dave Allen, Jimmy Tarbuck, Les Dawson, Dick Emery, The Two Ronnies, Celebrity Squares… you name it…
He told me that, taking a look at Lenny Henry’s website recently, he noticed that Lenny had credited him with changing his career path.
“I had no idea,” David told me.
“How did you change his career?” I asked.
“He used to do gags as himself and I suggested he did characters. When he went on This Is Your Life, he mentioned my name. It’s good to be remembered.”
“It is nice,” I said, “to change someone’s life when you didn’t even realise it. Who did you write your first joke for?”
Max Miller paid David £1 in the street
“Max Miller. He lived in Brighton. I lived in Brighton. I met him in the street, told him this joke and he gave me £1.”
“What was the joke?” I asked.
“I wish I could remember,” laughed David. “The thing about him was he never used a dirty word on stage and he was the dirtiest comedian. It was the audience who were thinking the dirt in the act. Comics nowadays will say ‘wanking’ for no reason.”
“You wrote for Frankie Howerd, didn’t you?” I asked. “That was all innuendo.”
“You never went into a room alone with him,” said David.
“Jonathan Ross,” I said, “advised me never to get in a lift alone with Frankie Howerd.”
“He’s remembered,” I said, but people like Norman Collier are not and he was a great comedian.”
The great Norman Collier – gone but not forgotten by some
“I remember,” said David, “he took me into a restaurant one night in Birmingham – on the Friday night before the Tiswas show (which was on Saturday morning) and he came in with a ten-foot ventriloquist’s dummy. He put it on the chair next to me and the waiter came along and gave us three menus. The dummy ordered a whole meal, then Norman got hold of a popadom, held it under the table and there was a Woof! Woof! sound. They threw him out because they didn’t allow dogs in the restaurant. But he had no dog. He left me sitting in there with a ten foot dummy.
“I was with him in Toronto and he had two dolls and vented them singing I’ll Be Loving You.… Two people bought singing dolls off him and they weren’t singing dolls.
“I was with him in Gibraltar… Barbary apes… He goes over and feeds them so their lips start moving and he starts talking to them and venting them talking to him. An hour and a half we were there. There was this couple from Alabama and they left thinking the apes talked. Norman stayed there until they were convinced and had left. They would have been telling everyone back in Alabama about the talking apes in Gibraltar.”
There is a clip of Norman Collier’s act on YouTube.
Den Hegarty had shaving foam problems
At this point, Tiswas presenter and ex Darts performer Den Hegarty came over, with two paper plates covered in ‘custard pie’ (actually white shaving foam) sticking to his face.
“Just like the old days,” said David.
“It’s not the stuff we used to use,” said Den. “We always used Erasmic. But this stuff stings the eyes. Though I didn’t used to get pies. I tended to get baked beans poured over me. Then people wrote in and complained we were wasting food and all the starving people in Africa could be fed with out baked beans. So then we had to make fake baked beans and they were poured over me.”
“The glamour of television.” I said.
The ending of the final episode of Tiswas is on YouTube.
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 